How Canada cut foreign workers and hobbled its meat industry

For a glimpse at how Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to immigrants may affect the meat industry in the U.S. — the world’s largest beef producer — look no further than across the northern border to Canada.

Three years after former Prime Minister Stephen Harper tightened restrictions on foreign workers to force employers to hire more Canadians, processors from British Columbia to Nova Scotia say the move compounded a labor shortage from which they have not recovered. The Canadian Meat Council estimates the industry has 1,650 vacancies at 19 rural abattoirs, or 9 percent of total employment at those facilities.

Carving up carcasses and packaging meat is messy, physically demanding work. And while workers get health and other benefits, the starting pay is below the national average. That’s why the Canadian industry, like its neighbor in the U.S., has grown increasingly dependent on foreign labor. Maple Leaf Foods said last year it was seeking to hire Syrian refugees to fill job shortages.

“We’ll take anybody that is willing to work,” said Ron Davidson, director of government and media relations at the Ottawa-based meat council, which represents about 50 companies including Maple Leaf, Olymel SEC and the Canadian units of Cargill and JBS. “We’re being suffocated. If you can’t get workers at the front end of the system, everybody pays the price.”

More severe measures proposed by Trump to limit foreign workers might be just as disruptive. U.S. plants, including pork and poultry facilities, already face labor shortages. Immigrant workers account for 35 percent of the 441,000 animal slaughtering and processing jobs, according to 2015 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Trump has pledged to protect manufacturing jobs by ditching what he considers unfair trade deals, pressuring companies not to make products outside the U.S., and building a wall on the Mexican border to keep out undocumented workers. Such moves aren’t likely to create more jobs for Americans in U.S. meat plants, according to David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University. He estimates three-quarters of the workers at processing plants in Iowa, the largest pork-producing state, are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Domestic workers probably won’t take those jobs, he said.

“It’s damn hard work,” Swenson said. “Historically, they have depended on those folks.”